This term we have been focused on getting to know our beautiful new children. We are finding out what they are interested in, the toys and activities they like playing with, who their friends are and where they are at on their learning journey. We have talked about our houses and what is important to us inside them. We have also drawn clothes on our little paper people.
These things are for our transition project activity where the children recognise an important transition from home to Koorlongka or from home to school. In the morning the children find their person and move it from the children’s home to the Koorlongka room. The educators then use this time to talk about how their morning was, how school was yesterday and how last night was and we can see how they are feeling today.
Also for our transitions project we have been talking about our first day at school or Koorlongka. The children were invited to draw a picture of something memorable from the day and talk to an educator about how they felt and what they did.
We celebrated Valentines day in Koorlongka by talking about who we love and why we love them. We hope you enjoyed your love cards from your children, they really enjoyed making them, practicing their cutting skills and writing skills.
We hope you have been receiving our Educa posts about your child’s day and thankyou for sending notes over Educa, it is great to connect with you and learn more about your children.
We have been learning lots in Koorlongka this February. We have been practicing breaking down words into syllables, like ba-na-na. Learning how to do this helps us to pronounce words correctly and helps us develop our sounds. It is also an important foundation block in learning to read.
We have been developing our vocabulary and forming sentences by jumping in hoops with one hoop representing each word in the sentences we create together. i.e. I love my mum because she gives me hugs.
Also in literacy we have been learning about the letters in our names. Every morning we find our name bag tag and put it out with our bag. We have also been finding the peg letters and pegging them on our name card in the right order to form our name. This activity gives us an introduction to letters and letter sounds. It also gives us a sense of belonging.
In numeracy we have been focusing on the terms less, more and the same. We have done lots of different fun and engaging activities to teach these terms. There is a discovery table where the children can sort teddies into groups by colour or by size and then determine which colour has more, less or the same. We have also done this activity as a group on the mat with dinosaurs, shapes, fruit etc. Finally, we have been experimenting with water showing more, less and the same by comparing the amount of water in cups.
We have had an exploration of height terms like tall, short and long. We explored comparing the height of our towers against each other’s and compared it to our friend’s heights. We are going to continue this exploration next month by adding numbers. We can do this using a measuring tape or counting how many feet our height is or how many blocks our height is. This exploration can link into our number learning.
We have been developing our sense of number this term starting with practicing our counting skills. Every morning we count how many children are in for the day, then we count how many boys and how many girls. We then compare these numbers to see if we have more boys or girls and who has less. We have also created a numbered carpark as a lot of our boys have been interested in cars. This is still a popular free play area in the day.
Finally, the children have been interested in our dice. We have been doing lots of practise counting the dots on the dice. We are going to extend on this interest by playing some dice games like snakes and ladders or spotty dogs or the dinosaur game etc.
Our Centre is starting to use a new program to build up our children’s physical literacy. It’s called Kiddo. In Koorlongka we are looking at developing our balancing skills. This term we have just started playing balancing dice yoga. This is where the children roll a dice featuring yoga poses and try and do the pose that comes up. Makayla, Alexia and Liam loved this activity so much that they wanted to create their own dice moves.
